Sending the women to save the suits

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What can you say about the men in a society that sends
women to fight its wars?

The temptation is to call them
cowards. That might be too harsh
(or it might not be). Whatever and
whoever they are, they ought to
feel shame and mortification when
they look upon the photographs of
Shoshana Johnson, a 30-year-old
single mother of a 2-year-old
daughter, languishing in an Iraqi
prison. We can only hope that
what is probably happening to her,
at the hands of men who are taught
by their degraded culture and
abased religion to regard women
as throwaway vessels of their
perversions, is not happening to her.

The capture of the courageous Miss Johnson, and the
news that another brave young woman, Jessica Lynch, is
dead has some of the aging radical feminists beside
themselves with pride and joy. Equal-opportunity death on
the battlefield is the latest triumph of the feminist revolution.
Body bags are the latest fashion, like something from the
salons of Paris. (Just so the bags are for other women.
Besides, the female casualties will be mostly poor whites and
ghetto blacks, anyway.)

Miss Johnson's predicament, and the predicament of a
little girl who may not see her mother again, is
"heartbreaking," concedes JWR's Anne Applebaum, "but it is not entirely unique. [Miss]
Johnson's child is one of tens of thousands who have been left
behind while their mothers - or their mothers and fathers -
go off to war. Is there anything wrong with that?"

Miss Applebaum thinks not. She cites no less authority
than an assistant secretary of the Navy in the Clinton
(naturally) administration as proof that Miss Johnson should
be grateful for what is happening to her: "After the long
struggle for acceptance, higher-ranking women in particular
loathe the idea of treating mothers and fathers differently."

Of course, the feminists demand that women be treated
differently once they're in uniform. Claudia Kennedy - a
general, no less - broke down in tears when one of her
colleagues pinched her bottom. When she recovered her
composure, she pursued the pincher until she got him
cashiered from the Army. Shoshana Johnson would gladly
settle for a hard pinch this morning.

The spoiled-brat feminists have no understanding of what
combat is about and no interest in finding out. Miss
Applebaum likens soldiering to lawyering, and suggests that
lady soldiers should get the kind of maternity leave available
in any white-shoe law firm. They should have the right to take
off to raise their children and return to military service a year
later, or five years later, and maybe soldier a couple of days a
week. "The military now needs to catch up to the civilian
world," she writes. If you can wrestle with a writ and confront
a tort without trembling, surely you can aim a mortar or fire a
rocket-propelled grenade.

But it's not the spoiled-brat feminists who are to blame.
It's the male policy-makers, both Democrat and Republican,
liberal and conservative, for whom people are not flesh and
blood who suffer actual pain and death, but are merely
statistics to be moved around on a spreadsheet.

When a
female colonel was captured during the first Gulf War a
decade ago, she was subjected to what the Pentagon, after
hemming and hawing, finally conceded were "sexual
indecencies." Nobody at the Pentagon would talk about it
because the fact of the "indecencies" went athwart the
policies demanded by the feminists safe at home. The
policy-makers, many of them chicken-hawks who were too
frightened or too proud to wear their country's uniform,
couldn't bear up under feminist pressure. An administration
headed by a draft dodger, and a credibly accused rapist at
that, could hardly be expected to regard "sexual indecencies"
as anything more than a little frat-house fun.

The generals knew better, as they know better today. In
the heat of the debate over women in combat a decade ago,
when this newspaper was making points that almost no one
else would, a very senior Pentagon general sidled up to me at
a Washington reception and, looking over his shoulder to see
that nobody was looking, whispered in my ear: "Keep it up.
Keep it up. You're right. I just wish we could say so." Then
he scuttled to refuge behind the buffet, in hot pursuit of an
iced shrimp.

The editorialists at the New York Times, veterans of
hip-to-hip combat in the salons of Manhattan, hailed the
capture of Shoshana Johnson as the smashing of the "glass
ceiling" over the battlefield. Women armed with sophisticated
weapons, the New York Times said proudly, might even
"outperform" men. This is no doubt on rare occasions true. A
gun in the hands of a child, or even a 60-year-old newspaper
editor, can be lethal.

Men can coarsen and toughen women for the battlefield,
making them accomplished killers. But what kind of sorry
excuse for a man would want to do that to the bearers of his
children?